Birgitta Englund Dimitrova
Professor em. of Translation Studies
Elisabet Tiselius
Senior Lecturer of Translation Studies
Updated October 2015
Description of research project
INVISIBLE PROCESS? OPENING THE BLACK BOX OF THE
COMMUNITY INTERPRETER
Project background
Community interpreting has come into research focus quite prominently from the
1990'ies. Discourse and conversation analysis have proved to be important and fruitful
methods for studying interpreted encounters. As a result of this, the earlier assumption
of the interpreter as a ”translation machine”, an invisible figure in the communication
process, has been convincingly refuted by researchers in different countries. Through
this research, the community interpreter has gained social and interactional visibility.
However, there has been much less interest in the cognitive processing of the
community interpreter, i.e. what goes on in her brain and how she manages the
interpreting process, often referred to in process-oriented translation studies (and in
psychology) to as ”the black box”. This is unexpected, in view of the fact that a focus on
cognitive processing has been quite prominent for a long time in research on other types
of interpreting, for instance simultaneous conference interpreting (see, e.g. Moser
Mercer 1997, 2000; Gile 1995 and later; Shlesinger 2000; Englund Dimitrova &
Hyltenstam 2000). The overall aim of this project is therefore to begin to open up the
study of the cognitive processing of the community (dialogue) interpreter.
There are a number of different factors that can be assumed to have an impact on the
cognitive processing of the community interpreter, and which have so far been
insufficiently dealt with, if at all, in the literature. Among them are:
1. Community interpreters alternate in listening to and speaking in two different
languages. This fact has several ramifications:
a. The interpreter’s competence in the two languages is quite often on
(extremely or slightly) different levels, in the best case scenario on native
level vs near-native level. This can be expected to have an impact on
processing, both in perception/comprehension and production. This has
been studied very little in the context of community interpreting.
b. In the process, the interpreter must be able to select and switch to the
correct language for production. The mechanisms behind a bilingual’s
language switch, for instance in code switching or, as here, in community
interpreting, have not yet been sufficiently explained.
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Birgitta Englund Dimitrova
Professor em. of Translation Studies
Elisabet Tiselius
Senior Lecturer of Translation Studies
Updated October 2015
2. In research on simultaneous conference interpreting, an important topic has
been how the interpreter allocates her (limited) set of attentional resources.
Cognitively, the processing in community interpreting is requires the
interpreter’s attention for a number of tasks, not only perception,
comprehension, transfer and production, but also:
a. deciding when to take notes, and do so in a prudent way (selectively);
b. monitoring the interaction process with the conversation participants, in
order to manage it as well as the cognitive interpreting process
3. Capacity of working memory (cf. for conference interpreting Timarová 2012)
4. A number of external factors already found to have an impact on other types of
interpreting can be assumed to be important in the context of community
interpreting as well. These include, e.g., acoustic quality, speed and mode of
delivery of the talk, participants’ accent and prosody, the linguistic complexity of
the utterances to be interpreted, etc.
A number of speech phenomena have been used in studies of simultaneous interpreting
in order to gain access to features of the cognitive processing (hesitation, false starts,
filled and unfilled pauses, etc.) Such phenomena could be systematically studied in the
production of community interpreters as well.
Aims of the project
The project aims are:
- to analyze salient aspects of the communicative process of particular relevance
for the cognitive processing
- to propose a model of the cognitive processing of the (professional) community
interpreter, incl. a competence model, taking into account process-oriented
research on other types of interpreting
- to probe into the cognitive processing of the community interpreter through two
kinds of data
o psycholinguistic experiments with professional community interpreters
and interpreter students
o videorecordings of interpreted encounters elicited from semi-scripted
roleplays both with professional community interpreters and interpreter
students
Abstracts of papers within the project
Joint paper by Englund Dimitrova and Tiselius
”Cognitive aspects of community interpreting. Toward a process model” (submitted for
publication, May 2015)
This paper discusses cognitive aspects of professional community interpreting. We give
an overview of earlier research into community interpreting, arguing that cognitive
aspects have largely been neglected. We propose that in building a model of the mental
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Birgitta Englund Dimitrova
Professor em. of Translation Studies
Elisabet Tiselius
Senior Lecturer of Translation Studies
Updated October 2015
processes of the community interpreter, different kinds of monitoring are a crucial and
pervasive component, contributing to and enabling the double function of the
interpreter, both to translate and to manage the interaction of the interpreted
encounter. We furthermore stress the importance of the notion of professional selfconcept for explaining the interpreter's decision-making, and exemplify this by
analyzing turn-taking in two Swedish-Spanish interpreted encounters.
Conference presentation by Tiselius at inDialog conference in Berlin, November, 2015
”Investigating the cognitive processes of Community interpreters: a
feasible task?”
In order to investigate Community Interpreting earlier research have stressed the need
to study the whole communicative event. This requirement possibly contradicts the
possibility of studying cognition and the interpreting process as previous studies on the
interpreting process have, to a great extent, only covered the interpreter’s perspective of
the communicative event. By only looking at the interpreter’s perspective it is possible
that research might overlook other important factors for the community interpreting
situation (such as the other parties). Could an investigation of the community
interpreting process include other participants’ cognition, or, does it become so complex
(depending upon the level of detail) that it risks not allowing it to be tested empirically?
Yet, studying the community interpreter’s cognition is necessary, and probably perfectly
possible and relevant, as long as the other participants’ cognitive behaviour is also
accounted for appropriately in the models and data. Furthermore, it could possibly be
done from the perspective of the interpreter and his/her central position as an acting
and reacting human and professional, in an interaction with at least two other primary
parties.
The presentation will look into different possibilities of investigating the Community
Interpreter’s process and cognition in the context of the interpreter mediated event.
This is part of the preparatory phase of an empirical research project on the Community
interpreter’s cognitive processes.
Project time plan
2014
2015, January
May, 2015
November, 2015
2016
Project start
Joint presentation at 4th Translation Process Research Workshop
in Las Palmas. Title: ”Cognitive aspects of competence in
community interpreting. Theoretical and methodological
considerations”
Joint paper: ”Cognitive aspects of community interpreting: toward a
process model” (submitted for publication)
Paper by Elisabet Tiselius: ”Investigating the cognitive processes
of Community interpreters: a feasible task?” at inDialog
conference in Berlin.
Paper by Englund Dimitrova: ”Cognitive load in community
interpreting. A reinterpretation of some earlier findings” (work
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Birgitta Englund Dimitrova
Professor em. of Translation Studies
Elisabet Tiselius
Senior Lecturer of Translation Studies
Updated October 2015
2016
2016
2016, Autumn
2017
2017-2018
in progress)
Paper by Tiselius and Englund Dimitrova: Don’t community
interpreters have a ”black box”? Approaching a missing link in
community interpreting research
Application for funding
Planning psycholinguistic experiments and elicited videorecordings
Psycholinguistic experiments and elicited video-recordings with
professional community interpreters and student interpreters
Analysis, reports
International cooperation
The project is discussing plans for cooperation with the project ”MH Medical
interpreting project” led by Dr Helen Tebble, Adjunct Associate Professor at Monash
University, Melbourne, Australia, with participation of Dr Jim Hlavac, Senior Lecturer
Monash in cooperation with health care and research staff at Monash Health, Melbourne,
Australia.
Birgitta Englund Dimitrova
Professor em. of Translation Studies
Institute for Interpreting and Translation
Studies, Department of Swedish Language and
Multilingualism
Stockholm University
SE-106 91 Stockholm
Sweden
Birgitta.Englund@su.se
Elisabet Tiselius
Senior Lecturer Translation Studies
(focus on interpreting)
Institute for Interpreting and Translation
Studies, Department of Swedish Language and
Multilingualism
Stockholm University
SE-106 91 Stockholm
Sweden
elisabet.tiselius@su.se
Bergen university college
(Dept. of sign language and interpreting)
Karolinska institutet
(Dept. of women’s and children’s health,
Childhood cancer healthcare research)
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